Search

Subscribe via Email

January 29, 2014

How Illustrator’s new Live Corners came to be

The AI team has posted an interview with product owner, Yogesh Sharma, in which he discussed his background & shares some insight into how the latest features came to be.

What was the biggest challenge for you and the team?

Our approach to creating corners and keeping them “live” revolves around several core algorithms. We generate the corners and grow them back to their original shape using math rather than remembering each corner’s radius and original form. One of the algorithms was turning out to be extremely hard to crack. In the next review meeting with Illustrator management, the team was given two weeks to figure out if the feature could be delivered in time.

Despite being under so much pressure, the team refused to give up. Two of the Illustrator’s seasoned engineers, Amit Kumar and Varun Nair, were asked to pitch in and help with the problems: that really turned the tables for us. Over the next couple of weeks, the team burned the midnight oil and cracked all the algorithms.

The team plans to post a whole series of interviews with team members, so you might want to subscribe to the blog.